#54. Jacob Aagaard Talks About Jeans And Previews Tata Steel!

This week’s guest on the New In Chess Podcast is Jacob Aagaard.

Jacob returns to the podcast after his last interview last year, in which he was interviewed about legendary Russian trainer Mark Dvoretsky, in his words ‘the biggest authority in my adult life’.

This time host Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam invited him to talk about what 2025 will bring us (yes, Wijk aan Zee coming soon!) and to look back on two major events at the end of 2024: the World Championship match won by Gukesh in Singapore, and the Rapid & Blitz World Championship in New York (in other words, Magnus Carlsen’s jeans and the uproar after Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi decided to share the world blitz title).

When Jacob Aagaard appeared on the podcast for the first time, he was introduced as ‘a grandmaster, a prolific and successful writer, a publisher of chess books at Quality Chess, and a top coach who has worked with many big names that we know and no doubt various that have remained a secret.’

Not long after that talk, it became publicly known that Jacob Aagaard had acquired the publishing houses New In Chess and Everyman Chess. Together with Quality Chess, they are now the New In Chess Group.

And so, before they go on to discuss the issues above, Dirk Jan and Jacob talk about this remarkable merger; how it came about and what the plans are.

0:00 – Intro

2:00 – Jacob’s acquisition of New In Chess and Everyman Chess

20:56 – Are we in a “golden age” of chess publishing?

23:25 – Jacob’s training camp in Singapore during the beginning of the Ding-Gukesh match

26:00 – Does Jacob agree with the overall criticism that the match was not played at a high enough level?

30:57 – Jacob’s Twitter/X opinions are his views, not his publishers’!

32:12 – Dirk Jan’s countless fights with Kasparov over content published under the New In Chess banner

32:41 – AD BREAK

33:20 – Jacob’s “no losers” approach to his acquisition of New In Chess and Everyman

35:25 – Why this match was not “unworthy” of the World Championship, according to Jacob

37:55 – Was the criticism expressed by Magnus on his Take Take Take platform too harsh?

41:10 – Magnus’s greatness is a “package deal”

42:53 – Gukesh’s team, Gajewski’s influence

44:50 – How important is mental coaching during a chess match?

55:43 – The jeans situation

1:01:20 – The underlying conflict between classical and freestyle chess

1:04:53 – The title sharing situation between Magnus and Nepo

1:06:39 – AD BREAK

1:08:28 – Is a shared world title acceptable?

1:14:07 – Jacob’s predictions for Tata Steel

1:20:59 – Outro